The report raises questions about how drugs are reviewed, approved and distributed, Fiona Godlee, the British journal’s editor in chief, wrote in an editorial. The studies originally used to establish the benefits of Tamiflu were written by Roche employees and paid consultants, under-reported serious side effects and failed to clearly identify all the authors, she wrote. In at least one case, a study was attributed to a researcher who disavowed any involvement to the journal, Godlee wrote.

‘Taken on Trust’

Governments relied on the studies to justify the widespread use of Tamiflu, known chemically as oseltamivir, she said.The reviewers were unable to find any independent studies of the drug in healthy adults, she said.[via Bloomberg]

The compilation of documents shows the influence of “Big Pharma” on the policy making decisions of the WHO, the UN body safeguarding public health. These confidential documents were obtained by the drug industry before their public release to WHO member states (scheduled to be released May 2010). The document also illustrates that the WHO expert group was highly responsive to industry lobbying — a result that public health groups had feared since early 2009, when the expert group met with the industry, but refused to meet with public health groups known to be industry critics. [via wikileaks]

The 400-year-old freedom of the high seas would be lost under United Nations plans to limit environmental damage.

Military forces of several nations are in discussions with conservationists over pooling surveillance resources to enforce the changes.

The “freedom of the seas” has given mariners legal rights to roam the high seas — a boundary that usually occurs 200 nautical miles from shore — at will. Specialists gathered at a London conference are saying that fishermen have been pushing the concept too far.

The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea came into force in 1983 and enshrined the 17th-century concept of the freedom of the seas.

(…)National defence agencies are being brought to the table to help to enforce the rules and discussions have taken place between conservationists and the Pentagon over possible synergies in preventing overfishing, piracy and terrorism.A European Green Paper is under consideration that aims to link the maritime surveillance capabilities of member nations, including both military and fishing interests. [via Times online]

But global warming is not killing the polar bears of Canada‘s eastern Arctic, according to one ongoing study. Scheduled for release next year, it says the number of polar bears in the Davis Strait area of Canada‘s eastern Arctic – one of 19 polar bear populations worldwide – has grown to 2,100, up from 850 in the mid-1980s.

For those keeping score, that’s an almost 150 percent increase in two decades. [via newsbusters]

SOME of America’s leading billionaires have met secretly to consider how their wealth could be used to slow the growth of the world’s population and speed up improvements in health and education.

The philanthropists who attended a summit convened on the initiative of Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder (sobre este senhor ver esta entrada), discussed joining forces to overcome political and religious obstacles to change.

Described as the Good Club by one insider it included David Rockefeller Jr, the patriarch of America’s wealthiest dynasty, Warren Buffett and George Soros, the financiers, Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, and the media moguls Ted Turner and Oprah Winfrey. [via Times Online]

Our speculation that the “secret billionaire club” meeting at the beginning of the month was primarily focused around population control. a cause célèbre embraced by David Rockefeller, Ted Turner and Bill Gates, has been confirmed by a London Times report.

Details of the secret confab were thin on the ground in the initial reports concerning the meeting of rich “philanthropists” like Rockefeller, Turner, Gates, Warren Buffet and George Soros, which took place in New York on May 5 at the home of Sir Paul Nurse, a British Nobel prize biochemist and president of the private Rockefeller University. [via PrisonPlanet]